In the Tenderloin
A man with bloodied foot
Yelled that middle class women
Outside Amoeba
Your mum — visiting for three weeks
Stepped on a human shit
And it was entertaining
For the guy selling the Streetsheet
That was before we bought
Towns Van Zandt’s record
And remembered to talk
About the sweetness of springtime
Every now and again
And you found
That codeine was a good friend
When the Giants won the World Series
A drunken mob set a bus on fire
And the lady standing next to you
Made the most of the broken windows of an electronics store
Berkeley went crazy on mushrooms
And you thought you would end up
In Rockland with Carl Solomon
Or in the Tenderloin with bloodied foot
Yelling something about
Middle class women
Across the bay in Oakland
At the Fox Theatre
Car horns sounded
And people cheered back from the sidewalk
Because Obama was back in
And we had a martini with a guy called Larry
Who kept saying
It’s a good day, it’s a real good day
At midnight
When the storm came
We left the calm of no. 24
And climbed the bald hill
At Bernal
Fell into the violent wind
With Tessa
And the incandescence stretched out ahead
To touch the racing stars
Emily Brugman writes and surfs around Byron Bay. She is currently completing her honours year in creative writing, while working at the public library. Her words have been published in Tracks Magazine, UTS Writers’ Anthologies 2013 and 2014, and Tincture Journal. This is her first published poem. You can find out more about Emily on her blog.